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Green Zone Down Bomb Hits Parliament
As Bush Moves to Make Baghdad a Prison
Chris Floyd
Lew Rockwell.com
Saturday April 14, 2007
The Bush-McCain
"surge" is working so well that now the very heart of
the American-installed, American-protected Iraqi government has
been struck by a bomb, killing at least two legislators, as the
Washington
Post, AP and the Guardian
report.
The Green Zone
blast came just hours after another bombing crippled one of Baghdad's
main bridges, killing several people and further choking off movement
within the city. But then, that too is part of the Bush-McCain surge
plan, whose ultimate goal is to turn Baghdad into a "community
prison," restricting the free movement of Iraqis in their own
capital. As Robert Fisk reports in a
major story in the Independent (entirely overlooked by
the American corporate media):
Faced with
an ever-more ruthless insurgency in Baghdad – despite President
George Bush's "surge" in troops – US forces in
the city are now planning a massive and highly controversial counter-insurgency
operation that will seal off vast areas of the city, enclosing
whole neighbourhoods with barricades and allowing only Iraqis
with newly issued ID cards to enter. The campaign of "gated
communities" – whose genesis was in the Vietnam War
– will involve up to 30 of the city's 89 official districts
and will be the most ambitious counter-insurgency programme yet
mounted by the US in Iraq.
But the imprisonment
of Iraqis within Baghdad – a practice that has been carried
out on a smaller scale elsewhere, including the wrapping of whole
towns in barbed wire – is not the only goal of the Bush-McCain
plan, Fisk notes:
But the campaign
has far wider military ambitions than the pacification of Baghdad.
It now appears that the US military intends to place as many as
five mechanised brigades – comprising about 40,000 men –
south and east of Baghdad, at least three of them positioned between
the capital and the Iranian border. This would present Iran with
a powerful – and potentially aggressive – American military
force close to its border in the event of a US or Israeli military
strike against its nuclear facilities later this year.
The draconian
plan to "enclose" vast quadrants of the ancient city goes
far beyond the stated policies of the Bush-McCain surge, Fisk reports:
So far, the
Baghdad campaign has involved only the creation of a few US positions
within several civilian areas of the city but the new project
will involve joint American and Iraqi "support bases"
in nine of the 30 districts to be "gated" off. From
these bases – in fortified buildings – US-Iraqi forces
will supposedly clear militias from civilian streets which will
then be walled off and the occupants issued with ID cards. Only
the occupants will be allowed into these "gated communities"
and there will be continuous patrolling by US-Iraqi forces. There
are likely to be pass systems, "visitor" registration
and restrictions on movement outside the "gated communities."
Civilians may find themselves inside a "controlled population"
prison.
In theory,
US forces can then concentrate on providing physical reconstruction
in what the military like to call a "secure environment."
But insurgents are not foreigners, despite the presence of al-Qa'ida
in Iraq. They come from the same population centres that will
be "gated" and will, if undiscovered, hold ID cards
themselves; they will be "enclosed" with everyone else.
A former
US officer in Vietnam who has a deep knowledge of General Petraeus's
plans is sceptical of the possible results. "The first loyalty
of any Sunni who is in the Iraqi army is to the insurgency,"
he said. "Any Shia's first loyalty is to the head of his
political party and its militia. Any Kurd in the Iraqi army, his
first loyalty is to either Barzani or Talabani. There is no independent
Iraqi army. These people really have no choice. They are trying
to save their families from starvation and reprisal. At one time
they may have believed in a unified Iraq. At one time they may
have been secular. But the violence and brutality that started
with the American invasion has burnt those liberal ideas out of
people ... Every American who is embedded in an Iraqi unit is
in constant mortal danger."
The plan's
failure will be profound, another senior officer told Fisk:
"Once
the additional troops are in place the insurrectionists will cut
the lines of communication from Kuwait to the greatest extent
they are able," he told The Independent. "They
will do the same inside Baghdad, forcing more use of helicopters.
The helicopters will be vulnerable coming into the patrol bases,
and the enemy will destroy as many as they can. The second part
of their plan will be to attempt to destroy one of the patrol
bases. They will begin that process by utilising their people
inside the 'gated communities' to help them enter. They will choose
bases where the Iraqi troops either will not fight or will actually
support them.
"The
American reaction will be to use massive firepower, which will
destroy the neighbourhood that is being 'protected'."
But of course,
in this, as in every other aspect of the Bush war crime in Iraq,
"failure" is a highly relative term. If the stated aim
of the Bush-McCain surge were genuine – providing security
to the Iraqi people in order to speed reconstruction efforts and
aid the nurturing of a non-sectarian democracy – then yes,
it is howlingly obvious that the plan to turn Baghdad into a gigantic,
open-air concentration camp is doomed to fail. It will simply radicalize
more Iraqis, kill more civilians and spike the body count of American
soldiers to new heights. But as we have stated here for more than
five years – even before the inevitable invasion was launched
– nothing that the Bush-led action does in Iraq has anything
to do with the welfare of the Iraqi people, or of American soldiers
for that matters. They are simply careening around from pillar to
post, trying to ride the wild beast of war they have unleashed toward
their ultimate goal: strategic
and economic domination of the world's oil heartlands, and the
never-ending expansion of an authoritarian
militarist-corporatist state in America.
Their main
difficulty comes from trying to accomplish this task without stirring
up the rubes back home too much. That's why they have not –
yet – adopted the most extreme measures advocated by their
cowardly cheerleaders in the armchair warrior brigade, the "more
rubble, less trouble" gang so
ably exposed recently by Glenn Greenwald. (I know I've already
mentioned Glenn Reynolds' genocidal phrase earlier
today, but it bears repeating how openly savage and murderous
these wretched bootlickers really are.) Most Americans don't like
to think of themselves as genocidal maniacs (instapunditniks excluded,
of course); they like to see their country as the "shining
city on the hill," a literally holy land incapable of any evil
action whatsoever. Thus every plot and ploy in Bush's thorough-going
rapine in Iraq must be portrayed as an act of altruism and idealism,
false rhetoric, outright lies and the incessant, obsessive manipulation
and/or repression of images and information. The Bushists must constantly
calibrate what the political market will bear, and so they do operate
within some constraints.
Unfortunately, the last few years have shown that the American political
market – the electorate, the citizenry – will bear a great
deal without really lashing out against the criminals in power.
Torture, murder, rape, the destruction of whole cities, the ongoing
aerial bombardment of civilian centers, the death of more than 600,000
innocent civilians – none of this has provoked throne-shaking
outrage in the American people. The fact that the mild rebuke they
delivered in the November 2006 elections has not only been openly
scorned and rejected by Bush but largely ignored by the supposedly
empowered Democratic opposition (with its "non-binding resolutions"
and demands that
Iraqis meet the all-important "benchmark" of an oil law
that gives the nation's resources to Western corporations) has not
produced any large-scale reaction. Of course, there is some hope
to be found in the growing numbers of municipalities and state legislatures
calling for an end to the war and/or the impeachment of the gangsters
who led us into it. But the fact that Bush has been able to launch
a major escalation of the war – raising troop levels and press-ganging
soldiers into even-longer tours of duty – after
losing the election is yet another indication of how much scope
for evil that Bush retains, despite his plummeting popularity.
And so, while
he cannot reduce Baghdad to Glenn Reynolds' longed-for rubble –
at least not yet – he can push forward with this new tightening
of the screws on his captive colony. When this inevitably fails
in its ostensible mission, they will lurch on to something else,
another scheme to keep the rubes off-balance for a few months longer,
then repeat the cycle again and again. Why? Because the whole
point of Bush's strategy is to prolong the American military presence
in Iraq. This is why American soldiers were sent there –
to stay there. And they will stay there – no matter
how many bombs go off in the Green Zone, no matter how much horrific
blowback is generated by the Bush-McCain surge – until the
American people make the political costs too high for any politician
to bear. And this includes the Democrats, whose vaunted "anti-war"
plans so far have all called for retaining some kind of military
presence in Iraq, and the handover of the nation's oil to the West.
As the man said, the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but
in ourselves.
INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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